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Expat

Oh my F-god – we spend the entirety of yesterday packing for our moving abroad, and it was much harder than I thought it would be.

You see, I confidently started my list last year of things to pack.

Admittedly, it was long. Over the year, through research, I deleted many items, added a few as I read various travel hacks and was inspired by other digital nomads. Knowing things like:

There will always be a washer and dryer available.

I like to wear the same thing every day.

Do not pack “just in case” things.

There are a lot of digital nomads traveling the world with just a big backpack. If they can do it, why can’t I?

(Oh wait, because I have a family which includes a young daughter maybe.)

Still! I quickly became determined to go backpack 🎒 style. I convinced myself that I could totally do it, because I told myself, “Kristen, you’re a bad-ass, you can totally handle this.” I love minimalism. I love reduced decision-making fatigue. I love feeling free as a bird and not weighed down by stuff.

The time is here! We’re moving abroad in the first week of March – fewer than 14 days away!

The Happiest Places on Earth 😃 pictured above… we intend to check every one of them out, plus so much more. I want to explore it all! Well most of it at least – I’m going to be leery of places with too many mosquitos, etc.

My family of three is going to travel the world, slowly (a.k.a. Slow Travel), in a digital nomad format. Greg works online. I work online. It all makes sense. 🗺

We want to experience other cultures and learn other languages. We want Kamea to see other parts of the world and see there are other ways to do things. Other ways to live.

We literally sold it all – we’re left with very few possessions and it feels fucking great!

The lease ended on our condo so we have no mortgage or rent. 🏡

We sold our car and stopped all insurances (bought some travel health insurance). 🚙

We donated / sold / threw away everything else. 👚👕👠👝

We started this plan about 15 months ago, and here we are. It’s finally here. Wow. 📝

We always knew we wanted to travel the world extensively, even before having our daughter. We spent many nights talking late into the night about how we envisioned ourselves with laptops 💻 writing on the Amalfi Coast.

Time passed though, 10 years, and I kept wondering when we’d do it. The question was how to afford it? Then, I read Global Student and realized families were doing this. They were selling it all to travel the world, and you know what? They’re saving big bucks doing it.

When you don’t have monthly expenses in the USA 🇺🇸 you can spend that money living elsewhere.

The only things left to do:

Figure out our cell phone situation with SIM cards. 📱

Pack – 🎒 I am determined to pack lightly but challenged because the weather will be varied. Our trip starts in chilly Denmark. 🇩🇰

Figure out absentee ballot process. 🗳

We will miss our moms though. That’s the hardest part of it all. 💗

Stay tuned to our travels as we write about them on my blog and create YouTube videos. If you have questions for me, hit me up on Twitter.

The year is almost over, which is a big deal for my family. Once January 2018 hits, we’re 3 to 5 months away from selling it all and moving abroad. We will be nomads… digital nomads? Slow travel nomads? Nomad family? Or… maybe Gastronomads?!

What is a gastronomad?

According to Mike Elgan, author of Gastronomad, it’s a “foodie who travels a lot.”

Gastronomad living is craft—and art. And most of what I learned, I learned the hard way: through trial and error (mostly error). I wrote this book so you can learn the easy way. Everything I know about living as a gastronomad is contained in these pages.

Being a gastronomad … yes, food is involved; and, yes, travel, obviously, but it’s a deep connection to people and cultures from around the world through food. Gastronomadism is meaningful and life-changing.

This passage from the book says it all to me…

The gastronomad mindset says to the world: I want deep empathy with you. I want to live the way you live. I want to understand you, by immersing myself into your community. I want to taste your climate and culture and history. I want to break bread with you, sit at your table, hear your stories.

Page by page I was saying to myself, “Gotta jot that down. Oh! Remember that, too. Hey, Greg, listen to what Mike wrote here.” I ended up reading much of the book aloud to my husband. Later one night after finishing the book, my 7-year old daughter said, “Mom, can you read some of those chapters to me too, you know the safety parts and the food parts? It all sounded so interesting. I want to be prepared, too.”

You see, funny thing, but this book exceeded my already high expectations.

A few things I’m organizing before we move abroad that are still on my “to-do” list.

Travel Insurance:

We will definitely get travel insurance while we are abroad and I need to research the following companies. The first one, World Nomads, is very popular. Reading other digital nomads and expats I see that many get travel insurance but rarely use it as many places around the world have such inexpensive (and excellent) health care that they just pay for it out of pocket.

It’s smart to have a proper credit card for traveling outside of the US. I’ll be looking for one that has no international fees on purchases for starters. Also, though, if we find ourselves traveling to more places in a more frequent fashion (not our original plan because we envision Slow Travel), it could mean more air travel so a card that has nice travel benefits will be a good fit. I hear a lot about the Chase Sapphire Preferred Card for racking up miles and such. I think they also offer free Global Entry credit.

Organize flight options

After deciding where to land first… is it Playa or Tulum in Mexico? Or maybe central Mexico in the mountains? Guanajuato perhaps? I will look at flights and keep my eye on them to find the best prices.

There’s a lot written on ways to smartly buy airplane tickets that can save a lot of money. I have a whole research file on just that.

We need to figure out the best cell plan for the area. As of right now, we left expensive AT&T for Ting which has been awesome so far. Now that I pay for only what I use, I’m waaaaaaaaay more mindful of my cell phone use when not on wifi. It’s a benefit for many reasons: less screen time, safer driving, and more mindfulness overall. Once we move, I’m not sure if Ting will be the plan as I hear a lot about T-Mobile being a good choice (Ting might even use T-mobile towers?). We’ll see because anything can happen over the next year.

Passports / Visas / Global Entry

Get Global Entry? I hear this can be useful. I need more research on it.

Update Kamea’s passport later this year.

Renew my passport? Greg’s?

Make “Copies” and have “Originals” of marriage certificate, passports, air tickets, insurance, list of emergency contacts, driver’s licenses, bank cards and credit cards.

Research visa options for where we want to go to plan how long we can stay. Mexico allows six months at a time.

Health

Take a self-defense class, for peace of mind I suppose. Just seems like a smart thing to do.

Learn advanced first aid.

Check in with our naturopath before we leave to discuss our travel and get any possible medications or advice.

Research area of travel for preventative health. For example, avoiding areas with tropical diseases or other potential issues as of now.

Language

Start learning some basic words in the language of our future destination. For us, that’s Spanish because we’re thinking Mexico is our first stop. I’m using Duolingo on my iPhone for now and I like it a lot.

Once we land there we will hire a tutor and go to a Spanish immersion school, but it’ll be helpful to know a few things before going.

Packing

I have an enormous list for packing which includes things for various destinations. I will whittle it down once I know for sure where we’re going. But for now, every time I think of something I just add it to my list.

My goal is to continue Minimalism as a guiding principle, but dammit I want to bring my Instant Pot. And chef’s knife (and sharpener and hone). And vitamins. And technology. And And And.

A short while back I wrote that the light bulb went on for me, with respect to having the freedom to up and move abroad, after reading the book, Global Student. Suddenly, it started coming together as a reality. We could really do this. We can move abroad and travel the world. For as long as we want.

That reality, back then, meant that our time was T-18 months before moving. (It’s now about 15 months.)

Having 18 months to plan this adventure of digital nomadism and expat life is proving to be extremely helpful. We have tons of time to:

Research possible locations.

Get passports, banking, and things of the like taken care of.

Take in every present moment right where we are, Carefree (AZ) which we love.

Once the idea hit us about moving and we had a target date of June 2018, I started with Pinterest.

Pinterest!

From Pinterest I found hundreds of articles for different destinations that I could later dive into for research. I spent a few nights… Pin Pin Pin Pin. I created boards for Europe, Mexico, Costa Rica, Thailand… of which later I created more specific boards: Mallorca, Tulum, Italy, France, Portugal, etc.

It was super fun. Here’s one of my favorite pictures I found on Pinterest. (source: Annelibush.com)

That sums it up for me. I’m going there.

Once I had my Pinterest boards figured out, each with plenty of Pins, I checked the various articles linked from them. That started a deeper dive.

Evernote!

It wasn’t long before it started to become overwhelming and I wanted a better way to organize it. Therefore, I chose to create notes in Evernote to keep it clean and handy. At first I had a Master list of regions with corresponding links to research later. It was one whole list of possible destinations with whatever links I thought might be interesting for each place. I set it all up to research at a later date (which I’ve since done) – deleting and adding destinations as I learned more.

From there, I added lists with links for things like:

packing lists

airfare sites and tips

expat experts

travel visa info

digital nomadism

technology for travel

travel with kids

housesitting

rewards credit cards

travel insurance

Books!

Through my internet research, I learned of some great travel books and read a few with respect to saving money, traveling with kids, and housesitting. I even bought a book (couldn’t find it at the library!), The Art of Risk, which I’m hoping encourages me to push beyond my comfort zone. That will be helpful living abroad.

She’s a great travel writer and blogger.

Google Alerts!

I also set up google alerts of different towns/regions so I can get more familiar with them, including any potential safety issues. For example, we had Playa on our list for Mexico, but late last year there was some violence that caused me to keep an eye on the area over the next 15 months. I also learned about a supposedly amazing place for pizza in Oaxaca using Google Alerts, so there ya go.

Podcasts!

Both Greg and I are listening to podcasts of expats and digital nomads. It’s nice hearing the real life stories of people doing exactly what we plan to do.

For the first couple months I spent all of my spare time doing this research. After narrowing down our immediate destinations (looks like Mexico first and then Portugal or Italy), I’m able to look deeper in those areas and hold off on the other places. Side note: crazy awesome story is it looks like I’m eligible for Italian citizenship which would be game-changing for us.

Living a life with a minimalist emphasis is a work in progress, naturally.

Even though I’ve sold and donated many things and happily reduced my overall consumerism footprint, I’m continuously finding new things to let go.

For the next step in our minimalism adventure, I wanted to look at our two cars. We have an old Mercedes (sedan) and a pretty-new Toyota sienna minivan. Greg drives the Mercedes, primarily. I drive the Toyota minivan.

I told Greg that I thought we could survive with one car, because we’re both home a lot. He works from home and I’m retired (I homeschool our daughter and play domestic goddess, but I don’t report to anyone –> retired).

I figured there might be a bit of sacrifice with a one-car plan, but nothing that we couldn’t handle. I loved the idea of getting a bit of cash for the Mercedes, too.

He was reluctant though.

Since the Mercedes is paid for (though it frequently hates us and has issues), he thinks we should keep it around. Just in case.

Then, he dared to suggest something. Since we’re interested in saving money, and going minimalist, I should pursue the idea of reducing the impact our awesome, gorgeous, fun, big minivan has… by going for something smaller. He offered trading in the minivan for a used car that is smaller and less expensive.

Oh shit. I didn’t expect that.

Ummmm…. I. Love. Our. Minivan.

I squirmed and got a bit uncomfortable, berating myself for opening this shit-can of worms.

Whoops.

Fast forward only a day or two later and that damn planted seed was taking root in my soul.

Why do I even have a minivan? Well, I know why I bought it originally. I didn’t care about gas prices. We like road trips. It’s new and has a nice warranty. It can handle a lot of groceries. I can move a table in it. And… for everything else… just. in. case.

Hhhhmmmmmm….. well. Let me be honest with myself.

I rarely move tables. I don’t buy that many groceries. I DO (now) care about gas prices and the impact a larger vehicle has on our earth. And, although we like road trips, we’re planning to move abroad in a little over a year so we will be selling (both) cars by then anyway.

Fast forward another day and I’m driving our BIG minivan with Kamea in the back to run some (local) errands. Wow. There’s a lot of space in this vehicle for ONLY TWO PEOPLE. Kamea and I are the primary users of this BIG minivan and it has a LOT of room in it for only us. Even with Greg, it’s still overkill for three people, especially given our future abroad.

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About Kristen Suzanne

I’m an author traveling the world on a multi-year odyssey to experience other cultures, and stay fit while I stuff my face with their food. (For now, meat anyway). I write about food, fitness, and our experiences as a digital nomad family.